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An Interview With The Developers Of FFmpeg

03-11-2009, 11:00 AM

Phoronix: An Interview With The Developers Of FFmpeg

Earlier this week the FFmpeg project reached version 0.5, which was quite significant considering no new FFmpeg release was made available in years. This release contained a plethora of new encoders and decoders, support for VDPAU, a variety of bug-fixes, and many other improvements. What is next for FFmpeg? When will we see proper Blu-ray support? Will there be a 1.0 release in the foreseeable future? To answer these questions plus others, I spoke with three of the main FFmpeg developers about this very popular -- and important -- open-source multimedia project.

A major one would be whether they envisage going modular/having plugins in the future.

Distributions like Fedora currently struggle with large behemoths such as FFmpeg as they cannot follow a model where they only ship the legally acceptable plugins allowing other repositories to ship the restricted ones.

That is FFmpeg's biggest weakness IMO and where gstreamer capitalises.

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A major one would be whether they envisage going modular/having plugins in the future.

Distributions like Fedora currently struggle with large behemoths such as FFmpeg as they cannot follow a model where they only ship the legally acceptable plugins allowing other repositories to ship the restricted ones.

That is FFmpeg's biggest weakness IMO and where gstreamer capitalises.

Well, Michael asked in the other FFMpeg article for any questions we'd like to ask, but there wasn't that much response

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That was a very informative interview- thanks Michael and ffmpeg devs. I was too late in spotting Michael's request for questions for the ffmpeg devs but they all got asked anyway (Blu-Ray and OpenCL).

Blu-ray is turning out to be the new Betamax, as many predicted. Sony have not done anything to endear themselves to supporters of free media and software so its not one of my biggest concerns although lack of simple BD playback under Linux is a bit of a blow to its desktop pulling power.

Congrats to the ffmpeg team on getting a new release out, ffmpeg is truly one of the greatest, most versatile treasures in all open source.

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A major one would be whether they envisage going modular/having plugins in the future.

Distributions like Fedora currently struggle with large behemoths such as FFmpeg as they cannot follow a model where they only ship the legally acceptable plugins allowing other repositories to ship the restricted ones.

That is FFmpeg's biggest weakness IMO and where gstreamer capitalises.

If they started cutting up ffmpeg up it loses it's appeal over independent codecs. If it was stripped down to just the free codecs that are supported you would be left with vorbis, faac, etc which already are supported as separate packages anyways and that's how distro's already provide support for those free codecs. Nothing would improve at all. ffmpegs monolithic structure is it's key appeal and advantage. Plus it would be a HUGE pain in the ass to package.

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A major one would be whether they envisage going modular/having plugins in the future.

Distributions like Fedora currently struggle with large behemoths such as FFmpeg as they cannot follow a model where they only ship the legally acceptable plugins allowing other repositories to ship the restricted ones.

That is FFmpeg's biggest weakness IMO and where gstreamer capitalises.

I know exactly what you are talking about, and from helping out on the IRC channel, it's a frustrating and annoying issue. Thankfully for the release, every single encoder/decoder, (de)muxer, and bitstream filter, among others can be individually set- either by themselves, or all at once with --disable-(muxers,encoders,decoders,demuxers).
Here's an example for Fedora:
--disable-encoders --disable-demuxers --disable-decoders --disable-parsers --disable-muxers (and then use --enable-(type from above)-(which one you want to enable)

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If I donate $25, and three other people donate $25, they could buy one.

Am I right or what?

And maybe some movies could be donated by somebody who owns some and is done watching them.

I don't see any options for donations on ffmpeg's homepage though.

And too bad ffmpeg-mt could take years. By then, it's probably not necessary anymore because a single core from any budget CPU will probably be sufficient for pretty much any video.

I really don't think that it's the cost of the drive that is effecting them. I think they would rather not have to worry about the lawsuit happy mpaa and sony targeting them as public enemy #1. Times are very different then when DVD Jon released the code to decypt DVD's.

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That sort of thing has not worried the ffmpeg people in the past. They never included decryption support, at least not by default. For example DVD cracking is handled by the libdvdcss stuff.

So this is mearly a question of supporting the audio, video, and container formats on decrypted or never-encrypted media. Remember that it should be quite possible for people to make blueray compatible media for their own purposes and companies to sell non-encrypted media. I think. People do that all the time for DVDs.

I think it's just a matter of the fact that they find Blueray uninteresting personally so haven't devoted a lot of time to it.

If buying them a blueray player would help then I'll pony up some cash, certainly. I don't own blueray, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't think it's important.

KUDOS TO THE FFMPEG PROJECT!!!! MAKING LINUX MEDIA NON-SUCK FOR YEARS AND YEARS!!!!